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From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past.
From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them - Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she's distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors' private lives.
To Frances' surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled.
But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don't quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.
"Starred Review. In the vein of Shirley Jackson's bone-chilling The Haunting of Hill House, Fuller's disturbing novel will entrap readers in its twisty narrative, leaving them to reckon with what is real and what is unreal. An intoxicating, unsettling masterpiece." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. A distracting plot element or two notwithstanding, Fuller's tale offers a gripping and unsettling look at the ugly side of extreme need and the desperate measures taken in the name of love." - Booklist
"Cannily releasing clues on the way to an explosive finale, Fuller moves fluidly between the time of the story and a period 20 years later, when Frances is lying in a hospital and close to death. The lush setting and remarkable characters make for an immersive mystery." - Publishers Weekly
"Bitter Orange is a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page turner about loneliness and belonging, a book that delves into its protagonist's mind and heart even as she explores the secret-filled mansion at the novel's center." - Gabriel Tallent, New York Times bestselling author of My Absolute Darling
"Like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Bitter Orange sings, enchants, haunts. If not for Claire Fuller's stunning language and mastery of control, I'd have succumbed to the temptation to blaze through these pages just to see how the suspense resolves. A beautiful novel." - Daniel Magariel, author of One Of The Boys
"A rich, dark pressure cooker of a novel that simmers with slow heat and suppressed tension." - Ruth Ware, author of The Woman In Cabin 10
"Claire Fuller is such an elegant writer and this book is incredibly atmospheric, vivid, and intriguing. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't reading a forgotten classic." - Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth Is Missing
This information about Bitter Orange was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
For first degree, Claire Fuller studied sculpture at Winchester School of Art. She began writing fiction at the age of 40, after many years working as a co-director of a marketing agency, she received a Masters degree (distinction) in Creative and Critical Writing from The University of Winchester.
Claire is the author of Unsettled Ground (2021), winner of the Costa Novel Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Bitter Orange (2018), Swimming Lessons (2017), which was shortlisted for the Encore Prize for second novels, and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) which won the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. She live near Winchester, England with her husband and a cat called Alan, and has two grown-up children.
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